Inflammation halts fat-burning

http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/8780.html

by upen • 10 years ago

133 112 10 years ago

merqurio3• 10 years ago

This is something under active research, and it might have some true behind, there are some cases in the hospital where you see people doing diet as they should and not lossing weight at all and at the same time they have some autoimmune condition.

It wouldn't surprise me to see a true connection found in a couple of years between autoimmune conditions and weight in a reciprocal way.

Havoc2• 10 years ago

couple of years between autoimmune conditions and weight in a reciprocal way.

Don't think it'll take that long. Both seem to be connected to messed up gut flora to some extent.

eagsalazar2• 10 years ago

If that is the case, I wonder what the impact of a fecal transplant from a person who "can eat whatever they want and stay skinny" would be?

alva• 10 years ago

"some cases in the hospital where you see people doing diet as they should and not lossing weight at all"

would love a link if you have one handy. it seems impossible?

greglindahl2• 10 years ago

This is not impossible. In some people, reducing calories (edit: by a lot) leads their body to decide it's starving, lowering their basal metabolism. Humans are a complex system with feedback loops.

(edit: note that I'm responding to the 'impossible' comment.)

merqurio3• 10 years ago

It's not a scientific statement on this case, it's what i see as MD. It's just an observation.

jimmywanger5• 10 years ago

not lossing weight at all and at the same time they have some autoimmune condition.

That means that they're retaining water. That does not mean that they're accumulating fat stores, which is thermodynamically impossible.

cphoover• 10 years ago

at first I read this as flag-burning and was so confused

mjevans• 10 years ago

“Obviously, one possible starting point in combatting obesity could be to inhibit the inflammatory response in abdominal fat while administering cGMP-stimulating active ingredients,” says Prof. Pfeifer to summarize the findings.

As someone with body fat predominantly in the torso I would love to benefit from this research.

BigChiefSmokem• 10 years ago

Doesn't look good for the kind of weight-loss consumers would look for. From the article:

"While hardly any inflammation occurred in the subcutaneous fat of obese mice and cGMP signaling was largely intact, things were very different for the deeper-lying abdominal fat: through the significant weight increase, inflammation had spread and the fat-burning turbocharger cGMP largely came to a standstill."

xutopia• 10 years ago

I am not a doctor and you should probably speak to one before trying this but there is some information regarding cryolipolysis. Apparently you can get some benefit from bring temperature of body down a few degrees.

http://theweek.com/articles/597862/truth-about-freezing-fat

nirajshr• 10 years ago

There has been increasing evidence of cold stress and fat loss. My understanding is that cold stress increases the BAT (brown fat) cells, which helps burn fat for energy source.

I have been reading the articles in this blog: http://hypothermics.com/. It is an excellent blog that chronicles many of the findings and the author performs a lot of these tests on himself.

mikeleung• 10 years ago

Ray Cronise goes through a lot of this stuff in a podcast he did with Dr Rhonda Patrick here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNzZod_d18A

Raphmedia2• 10 years ago

Wouldn't that make people living in the northern hemisphere less likely to become fat?

rhino3692• 10 years ago

People don't spend all that much time outside and when they do, they wrap up well enough that you don't get very cold.

These hypothetical cold fat burning technqiues, that I've seen, suggest inducing very mild hypothermia (shivering). That only happens rarely in the north.

OldSchoolJohnny• 10 years ago

I think it's the opposite, the colder it is the more people heat their homes / cars / dress very warmly. They probably get the least cold exposure naturally.

thomyorkie2• 10 years ago

Perhaps slightly, but there's a huge difference between cold air and cold water when it comes to removing heat from your body.

adrr• 10 years ago

Cold stress is interesting and how evolution allows our body to adapt. Another side effect is hair growth on the body.

JPKab• 10 years ago

I take cold showers pretty regularly. Living in Colorado, my tap water is very cold, since it mainly comes from reservoirs filled with snow-melt runoff.

The question though is can this impact abdominal fat or not.

drjasonharrison2• 10 years ago

Look into Ray Cronise's blog. There is a duration x temperature effect that is easier to increase a higher temperatures for longer periods of time.

petertodd2• 10 years ago

I'm convinced that cold stress adds brown fat and/or regular fat cells to your body from personal experience: when I started caving about a decade ago I had way worse cold tolerance than I do now; as caves are formed by water most caving is a relatively wet and cold activity. My cold tolerance also got rapidly better, maybe in about two or three years worth of caving, without much weight change associated with it, so I'd guess it was mainly putting on brown fat with maybe some redistribution of the existing fat I had.

Of course, that's no magic bullet: I've probably put on something like 20lb in that timeframe. I definitely need to get more exercise and eat better.

drjasonharrison2• 10 years ago

cold tolerance is also influenced by the ability of the muscles to burn fat to create heat. Adaptation to colder environments takes about two weeks. Ray Cronise's blog discusses this also.

hd4• 10 years ago

I've been taking cold showers since 2015 and have noticed a huge difference in my cold tolerance and also in how my body reacts to the food I've eaten. There is a point (around winter unsurprisingly) where it becomes too stressful because the water gets too cold to shower in. Anecdotal but I noticed I did lose more weight when I was taking regular cold showers, plus it helped me take up more exercise as my body became a bit more resilient and enduring.

coldtea5• 10 years ago

I have been reading the articles in this blog: http://hypothermics.com/. It is an excellent blog that chronicles many of the findings and the author performs a lot of these tests on himself.

The problem with such blogs is that there's one for all kinds of kooky theories. The hypothermics, the epsom-salters, the music-therapies, the low-carbers, the paleos, the whatevers...

Some theories might turn out validated by scientific research with control groups and everything, but it's hardly worth it trusting such sources until that happens.

thomyorkie2• 10 years ago

Eating a low-carb diet is a kooky theory?

ErikAugust• 10 years ago

Isn't there research that shows that ketosis provides an anti-inflammatory response? Moving into ketosis for fat-loss may be the right thing to do (at least for a period)...

antidaily2• 10 years ago

There is. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4124736/#S4titl...

Ive had pretty good success with Keto. Lost weight, have good energy. Check out the keto reddit if you want to try it out. Great resource.

treehau5_• 10 years ago

concur on a short term keto diet. I lost basically all my excess body fat. I struggled a little more with the brain fog, buy after doing it for about a month, I was able to get back into healthier habits. I wouldn't recommend it long term unless you have a medical condition that requires it. My nephew had seizures and he switched to ketogenic diet and his epilepsy calmed from multiple episodes a day to maybe one a day.

wdewind21• 10 years ago

This is all interesting, and warrants more actual research, but it's on a rat study that did not control for calories, so it's not super useful because we also know that:

1. Rats metabolisms are very different from primate and specifically human metabolisms

2. Even if they are the same, we already know that eating a caloric surplus contributes to inflammation, so it's difficult to disambiguate the effects of eating keto vs. the effects of eat fewer calories (which people on keto tend to do).

Nothing against keto, if it allows you to comply to eating the right amount of food that's great, but controlling for calories there isn't a ton of evidence in its efficacy over carbohydrate inclusive diets.

scythe• 10 years ago

I have a hypothesis that keto actually works just because the psychological effects of the ketone bodies result in less food consumption. Acetone (which accumulates in the brain on a ketogenic diet) is a sort of crude anaesthetic, and possibly, anaesthetics can reduce hunger.

If the (surprisingly large amount of) anecdotal evidence on /r/keto and similar messageboards is anything to go on, keto is very effective for losing a large amount of weight, possibly the best dietary strategy. But I don't think anyone really knows why.

hbosch• 10 years ago

As for ways to keep inflammation down, I assume cold baths and aspirin aren't exactly "enough" for noticeable effects at the moment.

Are there any more good ways to treat inflammation that would be a good supplement to exercise?

Apocryphon2• 10 years ago

Adequate sleep.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21112025

drzaiusapelord• 10 years ago

There's a strong connection between weight gain and sleep apnea. Often its misunderstood as "Oh just go on a diet and your sleep apnea will go away!" That works in some cases but for many it doesn't. Turns out the SA caused the weight gain via unknown mechanisms. Perhaps inflammation, perhaps sugar/food cravings to make up for lost energy, fatigue, etc.

gtrubetskoy• 10 years ago

Simply (ok it's not so simple, actually) reducing intake of inflammatory food such sugar in any form, preservatives, coloring, glyphosate, animals treated with antibiotics, etc. would go a really long way.

wdewind21• 10 years ago

I'd go even one step further: simply reducing intake of food period. Inflammation, short of a specific disease, is pretty rare in people who are not overweight.

xinyhn• 10 years ago

Also consider vegetable oils.

thenobsta• 10 years ago

Beyond what gtrubetskoy mentions (those are the basics which one should always follow), fish oil[1] and tumeric[2] have powerful anti-inflammatory effects.

[1] http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/supplement/omega3-fatty... [2] http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/herb/turmeric

GordonS• 10 years ago

Be careful with turmeric if you are prone to hypoglycaemia - I am, and had to stop supplementing with 1g of turmeric, since it was reliably dropping my baseline blood glucose levels by 1mmol/l (might be a good thing if you are diabetic though!)

anotherarray• 10 years ago

This is interestingly related to Dinitrophenol, which is widely used by bodybuilders:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol

johnward3• 10 years ago

Does in fact work and any aged used as a weight-loss drug for awhile. Highly toxic so you might die.

mr_spothawk• 10 years ago

"As the researchers have shown in various studies on mice, the widespread active ingredient sildenafil or a medication against pulmonary hypertension, for instance, can be used to reduce the number of white fat cells to the benefit of the brown fat cells and thus accelerate fat burning like a turbocharger."

isn't Sildenafil Viagra??

cmdrfred• 10 years ago

It is indeed.

evincarofautumn• 10 years ago

According to Wikipedia, it was developed to treat hypertension and angina, then the researchers discovered a happy (and very marketable) side effect during trials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sildenafil#History

wdewind21• 10 years ago

The problem here is what happens when the inflammation goes down? All that fat that's been stored is still going to be burned as energy assuming one is eating within a caloric balance.

It's frustrating to read all this research into the mechanism of what causes fat to be stored short term, because we already know what really causes fat to be stored long term: eating too much.

We need to be researching the reward systems associated with eating, and we need to start treating obesity as the mental health issue it is. It's a food addiction, and what we don't need to understand more deeply is how fat is stored. What we do need to understand more deeply is why people eat too much and how to get them to comply to healthier lifestyles. The answers are going to look a lot like drug addiction (ie: people are self-medicating depression, anxiety, etc. with food).

dragonwriter2• 10 years ago

All that fat that's been stored is still going to be burned as energy assuming one is eating within a caloric balance.

No, if you are eating within caloric balance, the fat will not be burned for energy.

we need to start treating obesity as the mental health issue it is.

Obesity is not a "mental health issue". It's a symptom. There may (or may not) be mental health issues underlying it.

It's a food addiction

Food addictions are a real thing, and obviously where they exist they can contribute to obesity. It's also clearly the case that obesity is not simply food addiction.

What we do need to understand more deeply is why people eat too much

There's a lot of work that has been done on this.

The answers are going to look a lot like drug addiction

If you mean "they are going to be very complex sets of environmental, genetic, and physical and mental health factors that combine differently in different people, and that often the most effective interventions will be more indicated by the current state than the root causes in individual history", I'd agree that it will look a lot like drug addiction. In fact, we already know that obesity is, in that respect, like drug addiction, so that's just predicting the present, not future results.

wdewind21• 10 years ago

There are not obese people who do not eat too much. They simply do not exist. Then the question becomes: why do they eat too much? Yes, you are right, it's a complex answer involving a ton of things. But my point in framing it as a food addiction is that the issue here is not that there is some kind of underlying metabolic damage or difference that accounts for obesity, unless that damage/difference somehow contributes to increasing the desire to eat more.

If we could somehow get them to simply eat less, the condition would go away. There are arguments to be made about the mind body connection, and I think they are real, but the issues here are not that obese people are eating the same amount of food as non-obese people and that inflammation is causing some of that energy to be stored as fat. It's ridiculous and misleading for people who are genuinely trying to change their lives to suggest that small effects like this are the cause.

Also:

No, if you are eating within caloric balance, the fat will not be burned for energy.

Fat is constantly being stored and burned as energy even within a caloric balance. You cannot store fat longterm without at some point eating at a caloric surplus.

monksy2• 10 years ago

I wonder how effective it would be from a diet perspective if you were to add things that are anti-inflamitory to your diet. (I.e. Green Tea extract suppliments)

copperx• 10 years ago

Before anyone gets the idea of supplementing NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatories such as aspirin), please know that the chronic use of NSAIDs has been found to be related to renal cancer (which is not curable).

monksy2• 10 years ago

The idea of people abusing Asprin scares the crap out of me.

Inflammation halts fat-burning

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